I ordered another coffee and glanced at my watch. “Mr. and Mrs. Brit are quite late this morning,” I said. Frank didn’t respond. Or he did, by returning to his Tacitus. I sat and waited, waited for the sun to burn off the clouds, waited for Frank to figure out what we wanted to do, not really caring if we did anything at all, waited in the way we had waited the previous days, for the day to take its natural course and we didn’t worry about anything, nowhere to go, no job to do, nothing to accomplish. “It’s called relaxing,” Frank had said.

Mr. and Mrs. Brit arrived just before breakfast service was over. They were not relaxed. They were still properly attired, but noticeably agitated. They filled their plates and sat next to us, and Mrs. Brit seemed hesitant, as if she wanted to tell us something but was thinking better of it. “We thought we were going to miss you this morning,” I said.

“We’ve had something of a morning,” Mrs. Brit said and her husband seemed resigned that the story would be told.

“Never had anything like it,” he said. “Not here anyway.”

“Maybe I misplaced it like you said,” Mrs. Brit said.

“I’m having more confidence in your version of things,” he said. “If you said you put it in the safe, you put it in the safe.”

“My watch is missing,” Mrs. Brit said. “I know I put it in the safe last night. I always do.”

“They have these safes, but how safe are they? They must have a master combination or key to them. Someone took the bloody thing.”

“The only thing missing,” Mrs. Brit said.

“Stolen,” he said. “They knew what to take and what to leave behind.”

“I don’t know why they didn’t take it all,” she said.

“You’ve talked to the police?” I said.

“We did, but they’re not much help are they,” Mr. Brit said. “The watch is probably in a pawn shop in Naples by now.”

“You never know,” Frank said. “It might show up.”

“It’s not a stray cat trying to find its way home,” Mr. Brit said. “It’s in someone else’s pocket.”

“You have to have confidence,” Frank said, and then I knew. I knew where the watch had gone and where it would go. I didn’t say anything. By the afternoon, the watch had been found, back in the Brits’ safe, exactly where they said it hadn’t been.